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Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Actor (Duke Johnson)

For as much light as The Actor is bathed in, it’s equally shrouded in darkness. Duke Johnson’s solo directorial debut is a film of bleary sun and swallowing night and almost nothing in-between. It wouldn’t make sense to depict the in-between. That would be realistic, and The Actor is anything but real. Jubilant strings swell over vintage opening credits as we peer at the peaks of skyscrapers in a still, top-of-the-cityscape shot not too dissimilar from the angle we get on Saffron City in the original Super Smash Bros. The twinkling black-and-white image has a glowy 1950s TV-hour charm, the text surrounded by mid-century atomic sparkle logos (see: poster). It transitions neatly into the doomy...

by Pawel Mizgalewicz

Making art – ain’t that the perfect job? Guided by inspiration, bringing light into the world, affirming and glorifying life? Well, maybe not every day. Here comes “Theatre”, a cinema verité-styled look at the creative process, set in India’s Puducherry. And, as it usually goes, the look at how the sausage is made is not as inspiring as the effect itself. The fictional amateur group creating the play seems to be constantly annoyed by working with each other, they spew obscenities at everyone they talk to, and question what they’re doing with their life. The film presents us their (second) job as a galimatias of almost everything going a bit wrong – the product going off the path, and the human connection among the crew lost in resentment and disappointment.

Theatre is screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam

“Theatre” was introduced in Rotterdam as a rare...

Jacques Rivette, one of the most prominent French New Wave directors, was known for his experimental, surrealist, and naturalistic approach to storytelling. He was also one of the most prolific and captivating French New Wave directors — ever since his directorial debut Paris Belongs to Us was released in 1961, the slow-burn master has carved a legendary career, establishing himself as one of France's greatest and most memorable filmmakers. According to the fan-favorite director Jean Luc-Godard, it was as though the filmmaker "had privileged access to cinematographic truth."...

Paul Vecchiali’s moody, labyrinthine The Strangler suggests the visual style of Jacques Demy’s Model Shop coupled with the psychosexual fervor of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s a queer version of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï by way of the story machinations of Claude Chabrol’s The Champagne Murders. Either way, it’s clear that Vecchiali’s interests are cinephilic in nature, and that this 1970 psychological thriller was his self-conscious attempt during the waning years of the Nouvelle Vague to take the movement’s genre-defying sensibilities in a new direction.

Throughout, Vecchiali is concerned less with plot than with mood and setting, which he largely establishes by showing people moving around colorful apartments and through the bustling streets of Paris. Take Anna (Eva Simonet), who rushes to a television station fearing for her safety after Simon (Julien Guiomar...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Fever (Maya Da-Rin)

The Fever, director-cum-visual artist Da-Rin’s first full-length feature project, puts a human face to a statistic that hardly captures the genocide Brazil is suffering. This is not just a wonderfully crafted, superb exercise in filmmaking, a multilayered tale that seesaws between social realism and magic. It is a call to action, an unassuming manifesto hashed in the present tense but reverberating as a plea from a world already past us, a memoir of sorts. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

French New Wave

Dive into one of the most fertile eras of moving pictures with a new massive 45-film series on The Criterion Channel dedicated to the French New Wave. Highlights include Le...

A woman sits on a park bench, reading from an enormous orange book. On its cover we can just make out the word “Magic.” The woman draws vaguely-occultish diagrams in the sand with her shoe—or perhaps she is just doodling. After a few moments, a loudly-dressed woman stumbles past her, dropping things—various small accessories, a doll—as she goes. The first woman tries to bring her attention to these missing items and then, failing to get her attention, sets off in pursuit. From the first woman’s strange hesitations and sudden decelerations, and the second woman’s occasional backward glances, we soon realize that there is a playful or ritual quality to their pursuit. Are we watching a kind of roleplay between friends or lovers? An extended and rather eccentric meet-cute? Two characters behaving, or two actors acting? The chase takes both women out of the park, up a long set of stairs,...

Mathieu Kassovitz’s celebrated story of inequality in a Paris banlieue is a timely rerelease in the Black Lives Matter era

Mathieu Kassovitz’s classic of banlieue rage has been rereleased after 25 years with a new urgency and relevance in the Black Lives Matter era. What comes across now isn’t the “hate” of the title, more the aimless, directionless comedy of three guys hanging around, bantering and squabbling about things such as which cartoon character is the most badass. It is touches like this which make you realise how very 90s it all is, similar to Tarantino and Trainspotting (with a nod to Taxi Driver’s “You talkin’ to me?” scene) but it also has a little something of the French New Wave, the world of Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us, all of which influenced the later Americans. It’s a film about which I’ve had fluctuating views.

While the English title of “Paris est à nous” reads “Paris Is Us” — it’s the title under which the film appears on Netflix — a more direct translation would be “Paris Is Ours.” While director Elisabeth Vogler has never articulated an intentional link, connotatively, the filmmaker’s title evokes Jacques Rivette’s “Paris nous appartient,” or “Paris Belongs to Us.” Rivette’s existentialist film from the French New Wave encapsulated Cold War-era paranoia; ironically, its characters are alienated from the very Paris they inhabit.

Continue reading Director Elisabeth Vogler’s ‘Paris Is Us’ Can’t Make Up Its Mind [Review] at The Playlist.

Every so often, usually while walking around Toronto on a busy day, I'll be struck by the vividness and accuracy of Agnès Varda's singular portrayal of a day in the life (barely two hours, really, making it even more remarkable) spent in the various layers and spaces of the urban environment. I speak, of course, of Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda's 1962 classic and the first film of hers I fell in love with. In those instances, I'll find myself returning to the moments I've cherry-picked as my favorites over the years, skipping across the linear sequence of events that follow the titular singer (Corinne Marchand) across Paris as she waits for the results from a medical examination within the film's designated timeframe (minus half an hour, as the film famously ends at the ninety minute mark). More than for any other film, engaging in these mental replays feels very much like replaying the events of a day I had once experienced myself long ago—albeit one that I’ve been able to revisit and come to know nearly by heart, complete with all of my favorite moments and details waiting in their proper places, so often have I gone back to that June 21st in Paris, 1961.Varda has even made it relatively easy for anyone who wishes to explore and investigate to their heart's content the events of that fateful first day of summer from so long ago now, not only by making such a crisp cinematic itinerary of the various locations visited in the film itself, but also by helpfully providing a map in her book Varda par Agnès complete with a color-coded legend indicating the locations of key scenes from the film, practically inviting the reader to recreate Cléo’s journey for themselves on the streets of present-day Paris. At once attentive and relaxed in its tour of the city (mainly focused in the Left Bank), Cléo is ably conducted in a number of different registers: as an uncommonly lovely essay-poem on the ebb and flow of urban life, an at-times somber meditation on the precarious balance between life and death, and a revealing and honest study of female identity and the ways it is scrutinized and distorted in the public’s relentless gaze. In a feat of remarkable economy and resourcefulness, the film was shot in chronological order across a five-week period, beginning on the date of the story’s events, synchronized as closely as possible to the times in the day Cléo experiences them, in keeping with narrative fidelity and proper quality of light for each scene. Neatly arranged into thirteen chapters, each with its duration clearly stated so we can easily keep track in real time, Cléo’s lucid odyssey through the various public and private spaces that make up her day is observational cinema at its most fertile, free, and magically attuned to its subjects, partly the result of Varda and her team’s carefully planned and executed shoot, partly that of simply being in the right places at the right times.Together, the films of the French New Wave make up one of the most valuable and immersive audiovisual documents of a specific time and place in history—namely France in the late 1950s and early 1960s—that we have. This is especially true of the Paris-situated films, which create the alluring image of an interconnected network of overlapping stories concentrated in a single city. The sharing of certain actors, cinematographers, writers, composers, and other key artists and technicians across different films by different directors especially helped make the impression of one Paris holding an eclectic anthology of New Wave tales. This perception was further reinforced by the cheeky self-referential winks and nods that so many of the New Wave directors—Jean-Luc Godard in particular—lovingly included in their films as gestures of solidarity and support with their nouvelle vague comrades. This is why the eponymous hero of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur, noted by many as a crucial New Wave precursor, gets name-checked by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s Breathless, why Truffaut muses Marie Dubois and Jeanne Moreau both pop up in A Woman Is a Woman, with Moreau getting asked by Belmondo how Jules and Jim is coming along, and why Anna Karina’s Nana glimpses a giant poster for the same Truffaut film as she is being driven to her fate in the final moments of Vivre sa vie.Varda got in on the fun herself in Cléo from 5 to 7 not only by casting Michel Legrand, who provided the film with its robust score, as Cléo’s musical partner Bob (a part that gives the legendary composer a substantial amount of screen time and amply shows off his incandescent charm), but also by extending the invitation to Godard, Karina, Sami Frey, Eddie Constantine, Jean-Claude Brialy, producer Georges de Beauregard, and Alan Scott, who had appeared in Jacques Demy’s Lola. They all show up in Les fiancés du pont Macdonald, the silent comedy short-within-the-film that serves triple duty as a welcome diversion for our stressed heroine, a loving cinephilic tribute to the legacy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, and an irresistible, bite-sized New Wave party. And yet I find Cléo to be perhaps the most enchanting of all the New Wave films not for the aesthetic commonalities and cleverly devised linkages that bind it to The 400 Blows, Breathless, Paris Belongs to Us, and its other cinematic brethren, but rather for the tapestry of curious details that root it in its specific time and place and entice on the power of their inherent uniqueness and beauty. “Here,” Varda seems to say as she follows Cléo across the city, “let’s have a look at these interesting people and places on this first day of summer here in Paris, and see what we can see after watching them for a while.” The film’s opening scene continues to extend this invitation as it draws us in closer. It shows us, through the sepia-hued Eastmancolor that deviates from the rest of the film’s silvery monochrome and the “God’s eye” overhead shots (long before Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson adopted the technique as their own), the cryptic spectacle of Tarot cards being shuffled, placed down, and turned over to reveal the story of Cléo’s potential fate before we’ve even gotten a chance to properly meet Cléo herself. The slightly macabre illustrations to which Varda and cinematographer Jean Rabier dedicate their tight close-ups and the elderly card reader’s accompanying explanations of their meanings lend an air of prophecy to the events to come while also fueling Cléo’s anxiety surrounding her fate (when pressed for a clearer forecast of the future through a palm reading, the reader’s evasive response is less than inspiring). This introduction effectively locks us into Cléo’s perspective, preparing us for the next hour and a half that we will spend quietly observing as, following her distraught exit from the reader’s apartment, she grapples with her fears and insecurities, contemplates and revises her appearance and the identity behind it (tellingly, we discover late in the film that Cléo's real name is Florence), and comes to terms with the ultimately fragile nature of her own mortality. In our allotted chunk of time with her, we see the pouty girl-child subtly shift and adjust her attitude, inching a little closer towards a place of earned maturity, grace, and acceptance regarding her fate, wherever it may take her.Along the way, the film seems to expand to take in as much of the people and places around Cléo as it can. Scene by scene, her Paris makes itself felt and known through key peripheral details: a pair of lovers having an argument in a café near where Cléo sits, listening in; the procession of uniformed officers on horseback heard clip-clopping through the street on the soundtrack and seen reflected in the array of mirrors placed throughout a hat shop; a spider web of shattered mirror and a cloth pressed against a bloody wound, indicating some incident that occurred just before Cléo happened along the scene of the confused aftermath. Other stimuli fill a dazzling program of serendipitous entertainments for us to take in one by one: whirlwind rides in two taxis and a bus, an intimate musical rehearsal in Cléo’s chic, kitten-filled apartment (with Legrand, no less, clearly having a great time, his nimble fingers releasing ecstatic bursts of notes and melodies from Cléo’s piano as if they were exotic birds), the aforementioned silent short, a sculpting studio (the space alive with the indescribably pleasant sound of chisels being tapped at different tempos through soft stone), a frog swallower, a burly street performer who wiggles an iron spike through his arm, and the soothing sights and sounds of the Parc de Montsouris, among a hundred other subtle and overt pleasures scattered throughout this gently orchestrated city symphony, a heap of specificities found and sorted into a chorus of universal experience.Very much in her own way, across a body of work informed by a boundless spirit of generosity, Agnès Varda has gone about carefully collecting and preserving a marvelously varied assortment of subjects throughout her busy life, shedding fresh light on some of the most unlikely (and overlooked) people and places in the world. She refers to her self-made approach to filmmaking as ciné-criture (her own version of Alexandre Astruc's caméra-stylo), which, as we’ve come to know it through Varda’s intensely personal works, is a little like cinema, a little like writing, and uses aspects of both media to make a compassionate, genuine, and wholly original film language. Just as Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), the dreamy young man whom Cléo encounters in the Parc de Montsouris, translates the world around them into a stream of fanciful observations and flowery speech, so too does Varda, in allegiance with poetry, ditch any semblance of objectivity, going instead for presenting the world simply as she sees it, investing it with her own unmistakable blend of charm, warmth, eloquence, and empathy, all somehow executed with nary a shred of ego or preachiness.“All these stories we simply can’t understand!” randomly exclaims a café patron to her young companion at one point late in Cléo’s journey, perhaps suddenly becoming aware, as we gradually have, of the unfathomable multitude of trajectories that trace themselves across every city every day in a dense tangle of narrative strands. In picking up Cléo’s and diligently following it with her camera for an hour and a half, Varda draws our attention to all those other strands that make up the lives of other people, leading off into their own directions, fated to become entangled with others still. Wisely, deftly, one discovered strand at a time, she helps us better appreciate, again and again, the humble miracle of so many lives coursing and thriving alongside each other, each one special and strange, each rooted in its own distinct flavor of being-ness. Cléo from 5 to 7 in turn roots us in another person’s life for its short time span and ends up giving us a whole universe, casually overflowing with meaning, life, lives, and the myriad details that shape and define them. No, we can’t understand all the stories we come across in a day. But then again, sometimes we don’t really need to understand so much as simply see. See, and accept, and appreciate what is...and then move along to whatever’s next.

New Wave director Claude Chabrol goes off in an odd direction with this Francophone adaptation of Hamlet. Convinced that his father was murdered, the heir to an estate behaves like a madman as he sets out to unmask the killers. The ‘castle’ is a country manse guarded by thugs as a precaution against the signeur’s striking union workers. Special added attraction: the stars to see are Alida Valli and Juliette Mayniel of Eyes without a Face.

Ophélia

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1963 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen / 104 min. / Street Date April 25, 2017 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.95

Starring: Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Claude Cerval, André Jocelyn, Robert Burnier, Jean-Louis Maury, Sacha Briquet, Liliane Dreyfus (David), Pierre Vernier.

Cinematography: Jacques Rabier, Jean Rabier

Film Editor: Jacques Gaillard

Original Music: Pierre Jansen

Written by Claude Chabrol, Paul Gégauff, Martial Matthieu from a play by William Shakespeare

Produced and Directed by Claude Chabrol

I suppose...

The Ninth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series started last Friday and continues the next two weekends — The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the mid-1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

All films are screened at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood).

The fest is annually highlighted by significant restorations, which this year includes films by two New Wave masters: Jacques Rivette’s first feature, “Paris Belongs to Us,” and François Truffaut’s cinephilic love letter, “Day for Night.” The fest also provides one of the few opportunities available in St. Louis to see films projected the old-school, time-honored way, with both Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad” and Robert Bresson’s “Au hasard Balthazar” screening from 35mm prints.

The Ninth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series started last Friday and continues the next two weekends — The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the mid-1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

All films are screened at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood).

The fest is annually highlighted by significant restorations, which this year includes films by two New Wave masters: Jacques Rivette’s first feature, “Paris Belongs to Us,” and François Truffaut’s cinephilic love letter, “Day for Night.” The fest also provides one of the few opportunities available in St. Louis to see films projected the old-school, time-honored way, with both Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad” and Robert Bresson’s “Au hasard Balthazar” screening from 35mm prints.

The Ninth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series starts this Friday, March 10th. — The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the mid-1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

All films are screened at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood).

The fest is annually highlighted by significant restorations, which this year includes films by two New Wave masters: Jacques Rivette’s first feature, “Paris Belongs to Us,” and François Truffaut’s cinephilic love letter, “Day for Night.” The fest also provides one of the few opportunities available in St. Louis to see films projected the old-school, time-honored way, with both Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad” and Robert Bresson’s “Au hasard Balthazar” screening from 35mm prints. Even more traditional,...

The Ninth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series — celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the mid-1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

The fest is annually highlighted by significant restorations, which this year includes films by two New Wave masters: Jacques Rivette’s first feature, “Paris Belongs to Us,” and François Truffaut’s cinephilic love letter, “Day for Night.” The fest also provides one of the few opportunities available in St. Louis to see films projected the old-school, time-honored way, with both Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad” and Robert Bresson’s “Au hasard Balthazar” screening from 35mm prints. Even more traditional, we also offer a silent film with live music, and audiences are sure to delight in the Poor People of Paris...

To celebrate The Criterion Collection’s 2016 releases — and there’s a lot to celebrate — Arik Devens, David Blakeslee, Keith Enright, Scott Nye, and Trevor Berrett gather to talk about the past year in Criterion, including their favorite three Criterion releases of 2016.

Subscribe to the podcast via RSS or in iTunes

Episode Notes Arik’s List

– Favorite Cover: A Brighter Summer Day

– Favorite Packaging: Trilogia de Guillermo del Toro

– Favorite Releases:

3) Fantastic Planet

2) Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy

1) Night and Fog

David’s List

– Favorite Cover: Lady Snowblood

– Favorite Packaging: Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

– Favorite Releases:

3) The Executioner/Death by Hanging

2) Chimes at Midnight

1) The Emigrants/The New Land

Keith’s List

– Favorite Cover: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams

– Favorite Packaging: Valley and Beyond the Valley

– Favorite Releases:

3) Valley of the Dolls and Beyond the Valley

2) One-Eyed Jacks

1) The Kennedy Films of...

For all his experience as a producer and writer — most notably as the head of Focus Features, and most specifically as a longtime associate of Ang Lee — it was an odd choice on James Schamus‘ part to make a directorial debut in his late ’50s — and especially by adapting Philip Roth, whose psychologically dense prose, to name but one thing, has stifled those attempting book-to-screen translations. But no matter the author’s typically precise and internalized perspective, the text in question, Indignation, should be an easier work to slide into, in some part because its ’50s-college setting creates an atmosphere that could easily be brought to cinema. Here’s the good news: to view Schamus’ own Indignation is to again witness an understanding of time and place.

Even better was the act of interviewing him. The extent of Schamus’ experience and knowledge — it’s only so often you interview someone...

It’s no real secret that we’re reaching a tipping point with home video. Streaming is proving a better and better option for the casual consumer every day, and even the cinephile dollar, which has rather successfully driven home video decisions for the past couple of years, has such services as Hulu, Fandor, Mubi, and – soon – FilmStruck vying for their attention. Physical distributors have subsequently doubled down on their most successful and acclaimed models. Criterion is going big on new-to-disc, big international titles with new restorations (Brighter Summer Day, Paris Belongs to Us, A Touch of Zen) and lavish new editions of American classics (The New World, Dr. Strangelove). Kino is investing in silent classics (Fantomas, The Phantom of the Opera, Diary of a Lost Girl) while diversifying to include more American studio titles. Masters of Cinema is going into deep specialty stuff with an Early Murnau box and Edvard Munch.

In this second episode of CriterionCast Chronicles, Ryan is joined by David Blakeslee, Scott Nye and Arik Devens to discuss the Criterion Collection releases for March 2016.

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Links Paris Belongs To Us Paris Belongs to Us (1961) Amazon.com: Paris Belongs to Us Paris Belongs to Us on iTunes Paris Nous Appartient on Hulu Senses of Cinema on Paris Belongs to Us DVDBeaver: Paris Belongs to Us Blu-ray.com: Paris Belongs to Us The Manchurian Candidate The Manchurian Candidate (1962) Amazon.com: The Manchurian Candidate DVDBeaver: The Manchurian Candidate Blu-ray.com: The Manchurian Candidate A Brighter Summer Day A Brighter Summer Day (1991) Amazon.com: A Brighter Summer Day A Brighter Summer Day Blu-ray A Brighter Summer Day Blu-ray A Poem Is a Naked Person A Poem Is a Naked Person (1974) Amazon.com: A Poem Is a Naked Person DVDBeaver: A Poem Is a Naked Person Blu-ray.com: A...

As a supplement to our Recommended Discs weekly feature, Peter Labuza regularly highlights notable recent home-video releases with expanded reviews. See this week’s selections below.

History is a misremembered lyric in Edward Yang’s four-hour Bildungsroman, as A Brighter Summer Day bridges a young boy’s personal turmoil with the larger politics of 1960 Taiwan. The young Si’r struggles in night school, attempting to avoid the teen gang violence between the island locals and Mainland transplants from the 1949 exodus. While Yang’s insistence on master shots might place him in later traditions of art cinema, this work’s novelistic unveiling of plot recalls the humanists of the 1950s like Satyajit Ray. Yang is a storyteller first and foremost, and, unlike Taiwanese New Wave counterpart Hou Hsiao-hsien, his frames speak directly and emotionally to the characters involved. These shots never pose an ambiguity as to what or where the...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.News Jan Němec, the Czech director of Diamonds of the Night (1964), has died. Keyframe has an overview of his work. Above: the Czech poster for Němec's 1966 film, A Report on the Party and the Guests, via Adrian Curry's blog Movie Poster of the Day.Speculation around the 2016 Cannes Film Festival selection is raging, but Variety is pretty sure it will include several new American films, including new movies directed by Sean Penn, Woody Allen and Jeff Nichols.The Criterion Collection has announced its next lineup of releases, which includes Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria, and Michelangelo Antonionio's Le amiche.New issues of Cinema Scope and Senses of Cinema are out. Yes,...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.NEWSDr No. Production design by Ken Adam.Our beloved production designer Ken Adam, the man behind Stanley Kubrick's War Room and the glacial period interiors of Barry Lyndon, as well as defining the look of the most gloriously grandiose era of James Bond films, has passed away.Austin's cultural mega-event South by Southwest has just announced the winners of its film festival competition, with Adam Pinney's The Arbalest taking home the Grand Jury prize for Narrative Feature and Keith Maitland's Tower the Documentary Feature Grand Jury prize. We were at the festival but, alas, didn't catch either of those films. Our favorite coverage of SXSW has been David Hudson's writing on Richard Linklater's new feature, Everybody Wants Some!! at Keyframe.The brilliant new film magazine Fireflies,...

Director Jacques Rivette just passed away back in January. There's more interest lately in his 12-hour opus Out 1, but if you'll settle for just 2.5 hours, this unique early New Wave feature will take you inside Rivette's world of artists, students, and refugees from political persecution, all in conflict in a sunny Paris of 1958. It's just as revolutionary as an early Godard or Truffaut, but in a style all Rivette's own. Paris Belongs to Us Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 802 1961 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 141 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Paris nous appartient / Street Date March 8, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Betty Schneider, François Maistre, Giani Esposito, Françoise Prévost, Daniel Crohem, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Marie Robain, Jean Martin. Cinematography Charles L. Bitsch Film Editor Denise de Casablanca Original Music Philippe Arthuys Written by Jacques Rivette, Jean Grualt Produced by Claude Chabrol, Roland Nonin Directed by Jacques Rivette

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The French New...

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

All The President’s Men will opens the 2016 TCM Classic Film Festival. See more films here.

Watch Yorgos Lanthimos and Ariane Labed discuss the making of The Lobster:

Little White Lies‘ Katherine McLaughlin on how Anomalisa echoes the existential blues of Chantal Akerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle:

What is it be human? What is it to ache? What is it to be alive?” asks customer service expert Michael Stone in Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s stop-motion masterpiece Anomalisa. These are the same questions that the late Belgium filmmaker Chantal Akerman posed over 30 years ago in her black-and-white debut feature Je, Tu, Il, Elle.

Watch a...

In this special episode of Off The Shelf, Ryan and Brian take a look at the new DVD and Blu-ray releases for Tuesday, March 8th 2016.

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Follow-Up Chronicles Episode 1 Brian’s Zatoichi set News Disney: Star Wars: The Force Awakens Blu-ray Announced Criterion UK Kino Lorber: Taking of Pelham 123, Deadline USA, Buster Keaton Short Films Warner Archive: Hitchcock’s Suspicion (Warner Archive) Masters of Cinema: The Last Command (Masters of Cinema) Arrow Video: June titles: Return of the Killer Tomatoes, Suture, Ray Harryhausen, Nikkatsu Diamond Guys Volume 2 -also Too late For Tears and Woman on the Run. Olive Films: May titles Goodbye Gemini, Puppet on a Chain on Screen Archives (Scorpion Releasing) Kingdom of the Spiders (Code Red) Links to Amazon Batteries Not Included The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas Coming Home The Forbidden Room Howard the Duck Hogan’s Heroes: The Complete...

For the first time in the Us, Jacques Rivette’s 1961 directorial debut, Paris Belongs to Us is available thanks to an accomplished new restoration from Criterion. A neglected title associated with the same crew of vibrant auteurs eventually known as the Nouvelle Vague of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Rivette’s thunder was stolen by more famous films from critics turned filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Francois Truffaut (even though it technically went into production before several of theirs). The initial lackluster response explains Rivette’s slower rise to notability, his particular methods and idiosyncrasies eventually embraced nearly a decade later when items like Mad Love (1969) and the monolithic Out 1 (1971), the legendary near thirteen hour production, were released.

Anne (Betty Schneider) is a young literature student in Paris, following in the footsteps of her older brother, Pierre (Francois Maistre). Afetr a disturbing interaction with a neighbor at her hostel,...

Every week we dive into the cream of the crop when it comes to home releases, including Blu-ray and DVDs, as well as recommended deals of the week. Check out our rundown below and return every Tuesday for the best (or most interesting) films one can take home. Note that if you’re looking to support the site, every purchase you make through the links below helps us and is greatly appreciated.

The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson)

Dense and lacking the playful quality of his more straightforward work, this represents a new multi-narrative direction for Maddin, and a kind of rabbit hole. Working within the art world verses the film world, Maddin’s work, style and influences have a tremendous amount of power applicable to cinema within the space of a gallery installation. Night Mayor, his first collaboration with the Nfb, fictionalized the tension between the Nfb’s mission and government controls,...

Every week we dive into the cream of the crop when it comes to home releases, including Blu-ray and DVDs, as well as recommended deals of the week. Check out our rundown below and return every Tuesday for the best (or most interesting) films one can take home. Note that if you’re looking to support the site, every purchase you make through the links below helps us and is greatly appreciated.

99 Homes (Ramin Bahrani)

Ramin Bahrani made a name for himself with three independent films over the last decade, focusing on humanity’s daily struggles, reinvented foreign lives in America, and a fundamental sense of decency. With 2012’s At Any Price and this year’s 99 Homes, Bahrani has twice returned to the festival that launched his career, presenting the evolution of those themes. Not coincidentally, the worst years of the financial crisis stand between his acclaimed Goodbye, Solo and the tepidly received 2012 picture,...

The legendary filmmaker has passed away at the age of 87. Here is the Notebook's coverage of Jacques Rivette, over the years:David Phelps on Céline and Julie Go BoatingDaniel Kasman on Don't Touch the Axe, Around a Small Mountain, DuelleGlenn Kenny on Joan the Maid, La religieuseMiriam Bale on Le pont du NordIgnatiy Vishnevetsky on Paris Belongs to UsTed Fendt on Paris s'en vaCristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin on Out 1 Jonathan Rosenbaum & Kevin B. Lee on Out 1Chris Luscri on Out 1Covadonga G. Lahera & Joel Bocko on Out 1Christopher Small on The Duchess of Langeais, Joan the Maid, Paris Belongs to Us, L'amour fou, Duelle, The Story of Mary and Julien, Céline and Julie Go BoatingAdrian Curry on the posters of Jacques RivetteCarlo Chatrian on (Three Reasons For) Remembering Jacques Rivette...

The Notebook is the North American home for Locarno Film Festival Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian's blog. Chatrian has been writing thoughtful blog entries in Italian on Locarno's website since he took over as Director in late 2012, and now you can find the English translations here on the Notebook as they're published. The Locarno Film Festival will be taking place August 3 - 13. Jacques Rivette in Locarno in 1991 when he received the Pardo d’onore. © Festival del film Locarno 1. Writing as a filmmaker “The only true criticism of a film is another film,” wrote Jacques Rivette, commenting on Ingmar Bergman’s Sommarlek (Summer Interlude) in 1958. He was making his intentions quite clear, and indeed his colleagues of the time recall how he was the first to be sure he would be a filmmaker. So a film cannot be explained in words, but Rivette still tried to put into words his own adventures as a spectator.

Every week we dive into the cream of the crop when it comes to home releases, including Blu-ray and DVDs, as well as recommended deals of the week. Check out our rundown below and return every Tuesday for the best (or most interesting) films one can take home. Note that if you’re looking to support the site, every purchase you make through the links below helps us and is greatly appreciated.

Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg)

Tom Hanks has a cold, and he needs to save America. A natural follow-up to Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln in its immersion into nitpicky political discussion, Bridge of Spies also distinguishes itself with a wittier, frequently downright sarcastic screenplay (mostly courtesy, one imagines, of the Coen brothers), more agile camerawork (the ten-minute opening jaunt through Mark Rylance’s Brooklyn morning has been a justified source of attention), and a different kind of lead...

Above: French poster for Paris Belongs to Us (Jacques Rivette, France, 1960).Over the years I have often wanted to write about the films of Jacques Rivette, but I have always been disappointed by the quality both of the posters for many of his films and of the scans available for even the better designs. With the sad news that Rivette has left us this morning at the age of 87—so soon after the triumphant resurrection of his magnum opus Out 1—I feel I should at least showcase the handful of posters that do this great director justice.The best Rivette posters are top-loaded at the beginning of his career. His adaptation of Denis Diderot’s La religieuse, starring Anna Karina, seems to have inspired the most varied work (so much in fact that I will save most of it for a later post). And there are a few other terrific designs,...

Jacques Rivette: Nouvelle Vague director with a reputation for lengthy films Photo: Unifrance

A French film director who was an integral part of the French New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague), has died in Paris at the age of 87.

Jacques Rivette’s celebrated films include Paris Belongs To Us, Celine And Julie Go Boating in 1974 and the four-hour La Belle Noiseuse with Emmanuelle Béart, Michel Piccoli and Jane Birkin in 1991 (dealing with an elderly artist and his creative rebirth). He worked alongside the likes of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol in whose apartment he shot his first short film Le Coup de Berger. He was also a writer with Cahiers du Cinema magazine and assumed the editor’s chair from 1963 to 1965.

He borrowed money from the magazine to fund his first feature, Paris Belongs To Us, which was released in 1961. Its plot revolved around a group of actors...

If I could properly describe the experience of discovering Jacques Rivette‘s films, I’d compare it to entering a room — a big one; sometimes a very big one — in which a conspiratorial game of deception and obfuscation is already underway between a group of handsome men and beautiful women. (Mostly the latter; sometimes only the latter.) While most directors ask you to sit and observe, you’re here invited to nestle somewhere between spectator and active participant, a patron whose close observation compensates for (or enhances) the fact that the plot doesn’t make total sense and associations between players requires some inference. By the time it ends, you’ll (ideally) come away with, if nothing else, the sense that something thoroughly, almost aggressively different has taken place — a mix of “well, what happened there?” with the desire to enter once more. And then again, and then again, and then again.

Cinephiles are in mourning today over the news that Jacques Rivette, the cerebral and visionary French New Wave director and Cahiers du Cinema editor-in-chief, has passed away at the age of 87. For nearly five decades, between his bold debut in 1961 with "Paris Belongs to Us" and his last feature in 2009, Rivette was responsible for some of the most challenging and medium-defying works (his movies often blended film and theater in a study and critique of visual storytelling), most notably the 13-hour "Out 1." As countless retrospectives and tributes continue to pour in from around the world, there could be no better way to honor Rivette's legacy today than by streaming one of his great movies. Fortunately, Svod platforms like Fandor and Hulu have a selection of some of his best and most essential works. Don't hesitate to give any of these titles a go. Synopses pulled from the streaming providers.

The French New Wave director’s noted films included La Belle Noiseuse, Celine And Julie Go Boating and Out 1.

Director Jacques Rivette, the director of titles including Celine And Julie Go Boating and La Belle Noiseuse, has died at the age of 87.

Rivette was a notable film-maker of the French New Wave movement during the 1950s and 60s, alongside the likes of François Truffautand Jean-Luc Godard.

He was also a critic for influential film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, writing with Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and others under the tutelage of editor Andre Bazin.

Often noted for the length of his films, Rivette’s 1971 feature Out 1 ran for a remarkable 729 minutes (depending on which cut you watch) and has since become a cult hit for cinephiles.

Fleur Pellerin, the French culture minister, tweeted that Rivette was “one of the greatest filmmakers of intimacy and impatient love”.

Martin Scorsese issued the following statement: “The news of Jacques Rivette’s passing...

Jacques Rivette Photo: Raphael Van Sitteren

Celebrated French director and critic Jacques Rivette died today at the age of 87. One of the founders of the New Wave, together with the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut, he was known for Céline And Julie Go Boating, Paris Belongs To Us and numerous other acclaimed intellectual works. In 1991 he won the Cannes Film Festival's Grand Prix for La Belle Noiseuse.

Rivette moved into filmmaking after writing for Cahiers du Cinéma, in which he cemented his reputation as a thinker. He wa a committed Marxist who frequently brought politics into his work. Like Marx, he was also known for the sheer length of his works, with Out 1 clocking in at nearly 13 hours.

Retiring in 2009, Rivette subsequently revealed that he had Alzheimer's disease. His passing was announced today by his producer....

Jacques Rivette, the Cahiers du Cinema critic and director of "The Nun" (1966), "L'amour fou" (1969), "Celine and Julie Go Boating" (1974), Cannes Grand Prix winner "La belle noiseuse" (1991), and other classics of the French cinema — more than 20 features in all — died Friday morning at home in Paris. He had Alzheimer's disease, the New York Times reported his producer Martine Marignac as saying, while the French culture minister, on Twitter, called today one of "profound sadness." He was 87. Along with Cahiers colleagues Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer, Rivette reinvented both film and film criticism in the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond. Truffaut may have been correct that the French New Wave began "thanks to Rivette" — his 1961 film "Paris Belongs to Us," inspired by Italian neorealist Roberto Rossellini, was shot in 1958, after Chabrol's "Le Beau Serge" but...

This month on the Newsstand, Ryan is joined by David Blakeslee, Scott Nye and Aaron West to discuss the March 2016 Criterion Collection line-up, the wacky New Year’s drawing, as well as the latest in Criterion rumors, news, packaging, and more.

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Shownotes Topics Criterion Close-Up joining the network The 2016 Wacky New Year’s Drawing The March 2016 Line-up Chimes at Midnight from Janus Films Recent Hulu, iTunes, Amazon and Fandor additions Tampopo New Phantom Pages (Klimov, Bondarchuk, Lerner, Dovzhenko) Blu-ray only releases upcoming in 2016: Hidden Fortress, City Lights, Tokyo Story. Haskell Wexler and Vilmos Zsigmond pass away. Episode Links Criterion Close-Up Joins Our Podcast Network! Criterion Close-Up – Episode 22 – A Room with a View Wacky New Years Drawing Hints At The Criterion Collection’s 2016 Line-Up Happy New Year! The March 2016 Criterion Collection line-up On… Paris Belongs to Us...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.NEWSFinally! New to the Criterion Collection is Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer's Day, one of the most important yet hard-to-see films of the 1990s. Also included in the recent announcement were Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us and Les Blank's A Poem Is a Naked Person.There's a new Kickstarter for "first publication on the films of Ola Balogun, the pioneer of Nigerian cinema, analysing/discovering his magical cinema."FESTIVALSThe Berlin International Film Festival Poster: The Golden Bear on the prowl! Meanwhile, more films for the Berlinale have been announced, as well as the theme—"Traversing the Phantasm"—for the essential Forum Expanded section.The 2016 Locarno Film Festival isn't until next August but we're already tantalized for their newly revealed retrospective, "Beloved and Rejected," dedicated to post-WW2 German...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

“Lynch/Rivette” enters its final weekend, and some terrific things are in store. On Friday, Rivette‘s Paris Belongs to Us and Duelle will play at 3:30 and 9:15, respectively, while Lynch‘s Lost Highway screens at 6:30. The great, inevitable double feature is this Saturday, when Celine and Julie Go Boating...

This article accompanies the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s dual retrospective of the films of Jacques Rivette and David Lynch and is part of an ongoing review of Rivette’s films for the Notebook, in light of several major re-releases of his work.Amour fou, in Lynch’s Wild at Heart, Rivette’s L’amour fou, is a pretext for the theatrical. Only in Lynch’s very romantic Palme d’Or winner do the shifts between and coalesces of plastic (the stage) and interior life (the love affair) lead to a union of any kind; when Sailor (Nicolas Cage) mounts the hood of his sweetheart’s Cadillac and serenades her with “Love Me Tender,” the superficiality of the reference to badboy Elvis Presley movies achieves a sort of extradimensional poignancy: the characters live in a plastic world, of Wizard of Oz witches, barroom brawls, lipstick-smeared killer moms, Texas hitmen,...

Set to arrive in the thick of the U.S. presidential primary season, The Manchurian Candidate promises to be a timely release from the Criterion Collection in March 2016. On a happier note, Edward Yang's masterful A Brighter Summer Day will finally arrive in a well-deserved deluxe edition, Les Blank's wonderful documentary A Poem Is a Naked Person will celebrate the artistry of Leon Russell, Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us will remind us why the French New Wave matters, and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves will break our hearts just when we need them most. Read onward for the complete announcement from the company: Paris Belongs To Us - Blu-Ray & DVD Editions One of the original critics turned filmmakers who helped jump-start the French...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Read More: The Coen Brothers (Finally) Join the Criterion Collection This January The Criterion Collection continues to fill out its 2016 slate with a new announcement touting the March additions, which include classic films by John Frankenheimer, Vittorio De Sica and Jacques Rivette. Les Blank's Leon Russell documentary "A Poem is a Naked Person" is also joining the collection after hitting theaters over the summer for the first time in 40 years, though the opportunity to own "Bicycle Thieves" on Blu-ray for the very first time is unquestionably the standout purchase of the bunch. Check out all of the titles hitting Criterion below, with synopses and special addition information provided by the collection. "Paris Belongs to Us" One of the original critics turned filmmakers who helped jump-start the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette began shooting his debut feature in 1957, well before that cinema revolution...

This article accompanies the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s dual retrospective of the films of Jacques Rivette and David Lynch and is part of an ongoing review of Rivette’s films for the Notebook, in light of several major re-releases of his work.Two uneasy debuts whose directors evince a canny feeling for the way the world, photographed with simultaneous emphasis and naturalism, might be turned inside-out by the camera. Working with a minimum of resources in their first features, these directors' ability to take their characters’ familiarity with their own living spaces (cramped hotel rooms, dingy apartments) and constituent clutter (lamps, drawings, notepads) and turn it against them, cast every anonymous object as part of a larger conspiracy, gives their movies their peculiar, anxious zest.1 It means that, in a similarly wigged-out way in Eraserhead and Paris Belongs to Us, both long gestating projects by nervous filmmakers in their late twenties,...

New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center is pairing films by David Lynch and Jacques Rivette in a series opening tomorrow and running through December 22. In Brooklyn Magazine, you find write-ups of Wild at Heart and Paris Belongs to Us. Meantime, Rivette's Out 1 marathon hits Nashville this weekend. More goings on: An exhibition of Agnès Varda's Cuban photographs in Paris, a revival of Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love in New York with a live orchestra performing Jon Brion's score, and the lineup for Rotterdam's CineMart, featuring new work by Radu Jude and Ciro Guerra. » - David Hudson...

New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center is pairing films by David Lynch and Jacques Rivette in a series opening tomorrow and running through December 22. In Brooklyn Magazine, you find write-ups of Wild at Heart and Paris Belongs to Us. Meantime, Rivette's Out 1 marathon hits Nashville this weekend. More goings on: An exhibition of Agnès Varda's Cuban photographs in Paris, a revival of Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love in New York with a live orchestra performing Jon Brion's score, and the lineup for Rotterdam's CineMart, featuring new work by Radu Jude and Ciro Guerra. » - David Hudson...

This month on the Newsstand, Ryan is joined by David Blakeslee to discuss the January and February (2016) Criterion Collection line-ups, as well as the latest in Criterion rumors, news, packaging, and more.

Subscribe to The Newsstand in iTunes or via RSS

Contact us with any feedback.

Shownotes Topics January Line-up February Line-up Latest newsletter tease (Paris nous appartient, Only Angels Have Wings) Manchurian Candidate Clouds Of Sils Maria Chimes At Midnight (Wex Arts Cinema Revival) Kieslowski films on Fandor Barnes & Noble Sale Criterion Blogathon Liv Ullmann, Angela Landsbury, and John Waters spotted at Criterion on Instagram 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days tease Shanghai Express Episode Links The Complete Lady Snowblood Lady Snowblood (1973) Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance (1974) The American Friend (1977) Bitter Rice (1949) Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) Gilda (1946) The Emigrants/The New Land The New Land (1972) The Emigrants (1971) The Kid (1921) The Graduate (1967) I Knew Her Well (1965) Paris Belongs to Us Only Angels Have Wings Liv Ullmann 4 Months,...

Award-winning French screenwriter known for his work on Jules and Jim, Paris Belongs to Us and and My American Uncle

The French New Wave, which changed notions of how films could be made, gave birth to a group of young directors headed by Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais and François Truffaut. Although they believed in Alexandre Astruc’s concept of the caméra-stylo – that film-makers should use the camera much as a writer uses a pen to create a personal vision – they still depended, for the most part, on screenwriters to help forge that vision. Among the writers most in demand, particularly by Truffaut and Resnais, was Jean Gruault, who has died aged 90.

Gruault arrived at the start of the New Wave when he co-wrote (with the directors) Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us (Paris Nous Appartient, shot in 1958, but released in 1961) and Truffaut’s Jules and Jim...

Jean Gruault, who wrote 25 screenplays between 1960 and 1995, has His screenplay for Alain Renais's Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980) was nominated for an Oscar and a César and won a David di Donatello Award. Other notable works include Jacques Rivette's debut feature, Paris Belongs to Us (1960), and Rivette's The Nun (1966); Roberto Rossellini's Vanina Vanini (1961) and The Taking of Power by Louis Xiv (1966); Jules and Jim (1962), co-written with François Truffaut, as well as Truffaut's The Wild Child (1970), Two English Girls (1971) and The Green Room (1978); Jean-Luc Godard's Les carabiniers (1963); Chantal Akerman's The Eighties (1983) and Golden Eighties (1986); the scenario for Resnais's Love Unto Death (1984); and he worked with Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne on You're on My Mind (1992). » - David Hudson...

Jean Gruault, who wrote 25 screenplays between 1960 and 1995, has His screenplay for Alain Renais's Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980) was nominated for an Oscar and a César and won a David di Donatello Award. Other notable works include Jacques Rivette's debut feature, Paris Belongs to Us (1960), and Rivette's The Nun (1966); Roberto Rossellini's Vanina Vanini (1961) and The Taking of Power by Louis Xiv (1966); Jules and Jim (1962), co-written with François Truffaut, as well as Truffaut's The Wild Child (1970), Two English Girls (1971) and The Green Room (1978); Jean-Luc Godard's Les carabiniers (1963); Chantal Akerman's The Eighties (1983) and Golden Eighties (1986); the scenario for Resnais's Love Unto Death (1984); and he worked with Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne on You're on My Mind (1992). » - David Hudson...